People who talk about fake news in the UK are guilty of fake news themselves

As the Brexit dust settled, a King’s College London investigation,
“UK media coverage of the 2016 EU referendum campaign”
, concluded that “the implications of a divisive, antagonistic and hyper-partisan campaign – by the campaigners themselves as much as by many national media outlets – is likely to shape British politics for the foreseeable future.” In other words, Brexit poisoned the well of trust still further.

Across the Atlantic, the success of Donald Trump’s post-truth platform, where every criticism was dismissed as a politicised attack and all media but the most slavish were failing and lying, introduced the concept of “fake news” as a way to discredit and disempower the inconvenient mainstream media. Toxic to the American body politic, fake news is actually a rarity in Britain. “People who talk about fake news in the UK are guilty of fake news themselves,” argues Dominic Ponsford, editor of
Press Gazette
. “Manufacturing stories to further a political aim or to make money through clicks just doesn’t happen in the UK.

“What we
do
have is highly partisan news and coverage when it comes in our national press. What’s changed is that the
Sun
or the
Mail
are now amplified by social media to people who don’t necessarily read those papers.”

In other words, social media is showing us what always went on in the papers we never read – and convincing us that the press is getting worse and worse.

But if a British reader’s Facebook feed isn’t as full of fictional, manipulative stories as their American counterpart’s, the suspicion of fake news is still out there, degrading trust in what you see and read. “Fake news is a double-edged sword and a worrying concept,” says Nielsen. “It allows established media like the
New York Times
or the
Guardian
to market itself as an antidote to deliberate untruth. But the problem is that talking about fake news obscures the more dangerous story – which is that much of the public has very low confidence in the ‘non-fake’ work of professional journalists.”

All these threads of suspicion and system failure came together in the horror of Grenfell, which brought its own bad news for supporters of traditional media. If
Brexit
, Trump and Corbyn were failures of national media then this was a failure of local journalism – to investigate municipal mismanagement and prevent such disasters from happening in the first place. “The local press has experienced a devastating collapse over the last decade,” says Ponsford. “There are whole boroughs of London that don’t have any journalists covering them at all. Kensington and Chelsea would have had a dozen journalists based in that borough 25 years ago. There’s no one there now. That can only mean that the councils there are not being scrutinised.”

Fig. 3.

shows an illustrative example of the nonrandom fragmentation patterns of plasma DNA carrying a fetal-specific allele and an allele shared by the mother and the fetus. In , each horizontal line represents one sequenced DNA fragment. The ends of the DNA fragments represent the ending position of the sequenced read. The fragments are sorted according to the coordinate of the left outermost nucleotide (genomic coordinate with the lower numerical value). In , the percentage of fragments ending on a particular position is shown. shows the span of all of the sequenced DNA fragments aligned to the same SNP obtained from the sonicated blood cell DNA of the same pregnant woman. shows the percentage of fragments ending on a particular position. The axes show the relative genomic coordinates. The SNP of interest is located in the middle (marked by a dotted line).

We further studied the coordinates that had an increased probability of being an ending position for plasma DNA fragments. We focused our search based on fragments covering the informative SNPs, so that the fragments carrying fetal-specific alleles and alleles shared by the mother and the fetus could be evaluated separately. We determined if certain locations within the human genome had a significantly increased probability of being an ending position of plasma DNA fragments using a Poisson probability function (
Materials and Methods
). A
P
value of <0.01 had been chosen to indicate statistical significance. Statistically significant ending positions were determined for DNA fragments carrying the shared allele and the fetal-specific allele independently (
Fig. 4
A
).

Fig. 4.

Plot of probability of a genomic coordinate being an ending position of maternal plasma DNA fragments across a region with an informative SNP at which () the mother was homozygous and the fetus was heterozygous and () the mother was heterozygous and the fetus was homozygous. () Results for nucleotide positions with a significantly increased probability of being an end of plasma DNA fragments carrying a shared allele and a fetal-specific allele are shown in red and blue, respectively. () Results for nucleotide positions with a significantly increased probability of being an end of plasma DNA fragments carrying a shared allele and a maternal-specific allele are shown in red and blue, respectively. The axes of the graphs show the relative genomic coordinates. The position of the SNP of interest is marked by a dotted line.

We identified a total of 8,242 (Set A) and 23,857 (Set B) nucleotide positions with a significantly increased chance of being an end for plasma DNA fragments carrying fetal-specific alleles and shared alleles, respectively, covering 10,233 SNPs; 8,909 of the nucleotide positions were observed to be overrepresented among the plasma DNA molecules with the fetal-specific allele (Set A) as well as molecules with the shared allele (Set B). We called this overlapping set of ends Set C (
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). There were 48,707, 53,901, and 65,205 plasma DNA fragments carrying fetal-specific alleles ending on Set A, Set B, and Set C positions, respectively. In other words, multiple fetal-specific DNA molecules showed identical ending positions. A median of 6 (range = 6–41) plasma DNA fragments carrying fetal-specific alleles terminated at a Set A ending position. Based on a sequencing depth of 270×, fetal DNA fraction of 31.3%, and the size distribution of fetal DNA fragments, it was expected that only 0.29 fragment would end at each site if the fragmentation of plasma DNA had been random. Thus, the probability of ending at these sites was 20 times higher than expected. There were 54,541, 376,343, and 182,791 plasma DNA fragments carrying shared alleles ending at Set A, Set B, and Set C positions, respectively. The genomic coordinates of Set A, Set B, and Set C positions are shown in
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.